Trade Winds
by Nienna's Scriptorium
Summary: Based on various prequels to The Iliad. A series of events changes Clytemnestra's fate forever as her husband Agamemnon prepares to sail for Troy. ClytemnestraAchilles. COMPLETE.
1. The Temple of Aries

**The Temple of Aries**

"My lady, it is good to see you in here."

Clytemnestra had felt someone watching her from the door of the temple. In this stifling heat, she felt she could sense anything if it managed to move. Any motion would bring an air current to her that gave her the false hope of wind, but was quickly dispelled as the sweltering heat touched her skin once more.

She turned from her kneeling position and eyed the visitor warily. "And you, also, Achilles," she replied quietly, returning to her prostration before the statue. She closed her eyes and tried to resume her prayers once more, but found that the heat and the knowledge that she was being watched were too distracting. Sighing, she decided to lie down on the silk pillow and try to at least get some rest. She had knelt before the small figure of Aries since the sun's zenith, and was too exhausted to mind her guests. Perhaps she might pray better if she could relax.

_I pray thee, bring him the Wind that will carry his ships across the sea. Bring Agamemnon the storm that will help him to devour Troy. Bring him the Wind that will carry him away from me._

She felt a little self-conscious, knowing that what she was praying for was not entirely for the good of her husband, and that she was thinking it in the presence of a stranger, but she willed herself to think it nonetheless. She did not understand it herself, but sometimes she felt she needed to rebel against him. She knew she should not, that the good wives of Greece kept their eyes on the ground and their doors unlocked, but she could not help thinking of all that he had done to her. All that he had not done for her.

He was still there, and he had moved closer. In fact, he had taken a seat very near her, so near that she could feel the heat from his body on her own. She frowned a little, and turned on her side so that her face was to the statue, and the part of her body closest to Achilles was her sandaled foot.

She did not want to be so close to him, but in playing the dutiful wife, she needed to attend to her guests as they wished. She knew what he did, that he was a mercenary hired by Agamemnon, and famous for his legendary invincibility. She still thought it funny, that her husband should take such an interest in restoring Menelaus' wife to him. Everyone who met him knew his ulterior motive, the reason behind every strategy he had helped play. Agamemnon would use both Helen and his brother to reach his goal of dominion over Troy. She had heard him, when she left their cold bed and went to find him, pouring over nautical maps and plotting with the heads of the Mycenaean army. He had talked to their daughter, even, telling her of the riches they would receive from Troy once he conquered it.

She sat up straight in alarm when she felt an unexpected hand on her foot. Achilles saw her start, and removed his hand, bowing his golden head briefly in her direction. "Forgive me, Lady," he said in his calm, deep voice. "But you were trembling."

Clytemnestra turned her face back toward the statue of Aries. In the fading light, shadows threw half the face in darkness, and now she felt like she could not pray anymore. Perhaps she would leave.

As she stood to go, she felt the man's blue eyes on her, holding her. "Did you get what you asked for?"

She sighed, and looked down at Achilles. He even knelt like a warrior, appearing to be at rest, but in reality prepared to spring up at a moment's notice. And like a warrior, he sought what was close at hand, what mattered most at the moment, pure honesty. Not like her husband. Agamemnon was renowned throughout Greece as the man who had forced his way into every home using power and wit. He had even entrapped Achilles into his service through cunning negotiations and deals with the other kings he reigned over. He had used his wit to claim Clytemnestra as his bride.

Even at night, the heat was intense as ever. She turned her face to the open doorway of the temple, searching for the breeze that would not come. She could see the ocean from her vantage as the sun gave last light over the water, but no wind came.

"I think you know that what I ask for, what we all ask for, has yet been in vain," she said finally. "The ships are still in port, after all."

He smiled at her, but there was something in his eyes that implied he was thinking far away thoughts. When she had seen him at dinner the previous night, while she entertained all of Agamemnon's officers from her head table, he had behaved in the same way, pensive, restrained. Then he seemed to come back to himself. "I do not think we seek the same end."

She knew then that she should have left before he said anything, but as he did, she knew he had intrigued her. "And what is it that my lord seeks in the Temple of Aries, if not a swift journey to Troy?"

He stood up, then, and reached his full, immense height. The glow of the sunset combated with the golden radiance of Achilles, and lost. He came towards her, holding her gaze all the while.

"Am I speaking to the wife of the High King Agamemnon, or to Clytemnestra?"

She was flustered, to say the least. "My lord, please," she tried. Then, after a moment, "But what is spoken in the temple is for the gods only to hear. Even my king could not request such of me." She should have left, once more, but her feet were rooted and her sights fixed on his motionless blue eyes.

He bent to her ear, and she struggled to hear him over the beating of her heart. "I would that Helen were drowned in the sea, or thrown from the highest Trojan wall, before the wind should come."

"Only if Menelaus went with her," she whispered in response, surprising herself.

He stepped back so that he was looking at her again, and this time a genuine smile graced his face. "Ah, but if only our king could see the two fools that we see. Worthless. It all means nothing to no one."

"It means Troy to Agamemnon, and that means the world."

He nodded, but his smile turned to a grimace. He folded his arms behind his back and walked back to face the statue. "So it is land. Here, again, I fight for something I will never have."

She took a step towards him, beseeching him, "Then why do you fight for such a man? Were you to leave Agamemnon, no Mycenaen could touch you! He cannot keep you here." She watched him for a moment, as he continued to watch the changing shadows over the statue of the god of war. "But there is something for you, in this war, is there not?"

He faced her again, and she could see sadness entering his being. "You cannot understand, lady. Not you or anyone, but Thetis came to me and bade me go to Troy. Something is there, and I cannot name it myself, nor can I say that _I_ understand it myself, but it will only come to me if I meet it head on. Somewhere on the beaches of Troy is my destiny." He seemed to search her face for any sign of sympathy.

Clytemnestra frowned. "Would your destiny not be as great if you stayed in Greece, without destroying Priam? Would your destiny be any different if Helen remains a Mycenaen or a Trojan? For she is neither, she is a Spartan, and Paris does not keep her any more than Menelaus does." Achilles turned back to the statue. "And you, my lord, do belong to King Agamemnon. Take what you will, but why in his name?"

"Soon, my lady," he spoke to her over his back, "I will have my own name. It is on the beaches of Troy. Then, perhaps, I will fight no more. What name have you?"

"My lord," she said, and backed toward the doorway of the temple, where the last light had faded over the ocean and the sky turned to lapis lazuli blue. "I am the wife of your King Agamemnon."

He turned for one last look at her, and she was glad she could not see his face in the dark. "I thought so, Lady Clytemnestra. And there we differ, because I know that I must fight to find my own peace. Agamemnon knows this, though he pretends not to. No words from you can stop me. But where do you enter? Exit? Do _you_ not have your own name, Agamemnon's Queen? Is your peace his peace?"

She knew she should have left long before, but it was better late than not at all. She picked up her skirts and ran from the temple.


	2. The Lower Bedchamber of the Palace

**The Lower Bedchamber in the Palace**

Hours later, and Clytemnestra sat before a mirror in her room. She was beyond the natural tendency to look over the lines of the nose and chin, the colors of the eyes, and to ponder each strand of hair to its end. She stared past her own face for so long that she brewed an incomprehensible urge to strip everything away and have done with it. It did not matter if she was pretty—not that she knew whether or not she was beautiful—it was all a mask, a horrible mask made by a tribe of self-deception.

But then… should she tear it off… what would she reveal to the world?

Anything at all?

It was stiflingly hot in the palace that night, enough to break through her reverie and display a film of sweat on her motionless brow. She hated many things about this palace: the way all the windows were high on the walls so no once could see out, the bloodstained kitchens where too many soldiers had scuffled in its previous history, but most of all she hated the heat.

She had taken a lower bedroom, anyway. Her loneliness was more important to her than physical comfort.

She managed to be glad of her oneness and sick for her children at the same time, and so she often wondered whether it really was worth her while to torment her heart in so many ways.

She finally stood up and paced the broad expanse of the room until she came to the unlit firepit. It was strange to have this in her room, and she had spent far more than this evening wondering over its previous uses. Perhaps a useless old kitchen, or the remnants of a soldier's barracks. She imagined most, however, that it was an old temple built on to the sprawling house.

She wondered, too, to what god it might have sent sacrifices. The stones surrounding the pit were the coldest things she had touched all day, as she bent and caressed the blackened rock. They were carved so that the angular shapes of centaurs, deer, and great birds seemed to cross from one stone to another. It was not hard to imagine tributes to Artemis stirring in the smoky room.

Clytemnestra liked to think that Artemis had been worshipped in her bedroom. Artemis, whose image now hung half-hidden in the black sky. Artemis, whose grace had allowed Clytemnestra to happily bear Orestes, Iphigenia, and Electra. Artemis, whose carved animals that roamed the stones were also found plentiful in the hills of Aulis.

Clytemnestra lifted her robes and stepped over the stones, then knelt in the center of the barren pit. For a moment, she considered jumping back out in fear that what she was about to do was blasphemous, maybe she was offending some unknown deity, but she closed her eyes and settled herself to her task.

"Artemis, the Great Protector," she intoned. "Hear my prayer. See she ships off safely; see them off soon. Greatest Artemis, I beg you, end this standstill now."

Clytemnestra suddenly felt a stir about her, and looked frantically about the room for signs of change. There was now wind; not one heavy blanket stirred in a breeze. She had felt something in the room; what was it?

"So this is what you have been amusing yourself with all evening."

She felt the warm air blowing on the back of her neck, but she did not welcome it, or the hand that followed it with a feather-light touch.

"I have been looking for you."

She stood and faced him.

She had heard enough stories all her life to have expected differently. She had been prepared for the adultery, the violence, the callousness, the vulgarity, but there was something about Agamemnon that disarmed her and had led her to this pit of self-doubt on this night. In all those stories, the men were dumb, or cowards, or drunks.

"It has been a long day, Clytemnestra."

He was wonderfully horrible; charismatically brutish; beautifully torturous; she hated him and could not help attracting to him. Not now, though; she was never attracted to him in the way she had heard in those stories of her girlhood. The women that told those stories had all had abusers and lovers and every sort of man, but none would ever know one so magnificent as Agamemnon.

"You have seemed preoccupied all day. Even when we had our guests to dinner. Perhaps you should put yourself to bed?"

Oh, he could be like this. He could be normal, or at least she knew he appeared that way. In the first months of their marriage she had seen him as normal and brilliant. Now she knew he was never quite normal at all. Everything he did was specifically calculated and processed and perfected and it all went to benefiting his own purposes, though what those were, she thought she might never know. She would look into his dark brown eyes as she did now and never see behind the veiled visage.

He was moving away from her and ambling around the large room, moving closer and closer to her bed. Once he stood in front of it, he stopped and reached out a hand, pressing gently into the mattress. A veiled smile lifted his facial expression, and he said over his shoulder. "No wonder you are up. I would not sleep here, either. Would another room help you fall asleep? There are others on the main level."

She closed her eyes for several seconds and breathed, then opened them again. Agamemnon. "I do not think so, no. I am fine here. Don't trouble yourself."

He looked at her again, and she wanted to close her eyes again. Sometimes his thoughts were so clear she wanted to cry for the power she saw in them. "The rooms are a distance from mine."

She had suspected he knew for a while, but this subtle admittance was enough to weaken her will. She cast around for a chair, and stumbled out of the pit on her way to a crude stone seat near the outside wall. _Oh, appearances, this is the way it will be for the rest of my life, I must not make it worse by angering him in my distaste. _She consciously pulled herself upright and purposefully sat herself in the chair. "I will not sleep anywhere in this heat, Husband. I should be down here so as not to bother anyone else with my pacing."

He came back near her. She looked first to his face, where his expression remained unchanged, and then she looked to his clothes. He wore full war regalia, lacking only prizes he had won from others. He was not dressed for sleep at all. She began to wonder exceedingly at his purpose for coming down here, to these forgotten halls of his second-rate palace.

He stopped, placed his large hands together in front of him. "Odysseus asked after you. His wife asks after you, too, and that is why he continually asked me where you were tonight. I could not answer him."

She stood, and then wondered what she had thought she would do once she had stood. Oppose him? She never had, and never would. Run? He had fought far too many battles to allow a wearied mother more than a few feet in flight from him. Breakdown? It would serve no purpose except to confuse him, and he had called her out more than once on appearances before other leaders.

"Go upstairs and stay in the bedchamber on the western wall. I will be away tonight. Find a lady to help you move any things you might need. Perhaps you might find it within yourself to pay some respects to the lords tomorrow morning." There was something in his carriage that conveyed a strange hurt that she had caused him, and something that remained hidden from her and all others. He was planning. He was plotting. Neither she nor anyone could ever grievously hurt him. "Only if you feel up to it."

He was leaving, and Clytemnestra was always relieved at his exit, but tonight she saw failure in herself as well as her husband. The women had told her to be loyal, to be the good Greek hostess, and she, the Spartan princess, was ruining everything for her whole household. None of them would ever share a bed with Agamemnon, but then she counted herself as extraordinary, and rapidly mustered her courage. There was always time later for her to be alone.

"I do miss you, Agamemnon. I am sorry to have disappointed you today."

He stopped on his way to the door, and said without looking at her, "Do not worry about disappointing me, my lady. I have others to perform the services that you will not."

"Oh!" she breathed, and wished instantly she could inhale it back the moment she had accidentally let it go.

But he had not heard her. He was already gone, and she was left to unwind her sheets from the hot bed on her own.


	3. The Port of Aulis

**The Coast of Aulis**

Clytemnestra awoke early, and to much exhaustion. Lying motionless on top of the bedclothes, she calculated by the light from the high window that she had but two hours of sleep behind her. She shivered in the pale, misty air of her small room and pulled her legs underneath the sheets. Had she not been raised half-wild in Sparta, where she galloped day and night with her sisters and taught herself to survive as if she were some Amazon princess, she would not have been able to tell the time.

She knew many other things from her childhood, like how to track an eagle, or catch fish without a net, but her particular skill that she had heralded over her siblings was her ability to tell any time of night or day. Of course, there was no known formula for seeing the hour at night, and so her abilities were worshipped by the others for their incomprehensibility. Perhaps more certainly than anything in her life, Clytemnestra knew that it was five hours past midnight. And that the breeze on her bare arms was beginning to make her uncomfortable.

Breeze.

Wind.

Wind was coming in through the high open window.

The air was moving at Aulis.

Clytemnestra found herself kneeling on her bed and out of breath, and she knew not why. She could not see out that damnably high window, and so she tumbled leapt off her bed and threw a sheer wrapper over her shoulders and hurried out into the passageway.

Her bare feet slapped on the stone floor as she raced down toward the main hall.

"My lord, my lord!" she shouted, and felt the vibrating echoes hit her back in the face. She stopped immediately and waited until her breathing was back to normal, and she could hear everything around her.

But there was nothing to hear.

No one was in the palace.

There were no other frantic women racing about as she did. The sounds of troubled murmuring and deep sleep did not reach her ears from the men's bedchambers.

There were no guards at the main entrance.

Clytemnestra stood in the great receiving hall of the palace, felt the wind stir her hair from her face and the wrapper as it trailed around her bare legs, and her heart began to beat in a strange rhythm, though one not entirely foreign. She had stood and felt wind about her and listened to nothing with her heart beginning to race, and it had been the time when she was ten years old and she and her sister Helen had known a wolf den was near where they paused in the forest.

No one was in the palace, because Agamemnon was to sail and sack Troy on this day.

The doors to his palace were wide open. Clytemnestra walked through them and marveled at the lapis lazuli carvings inlaid on the beach wood, and slowly smiled. Oh, he was proud and arrogant, but unlike those Greek men in the stories of the Greek women as told to the young Spartan princess, Agamemnon was made thrice sure of everything before proclaiming his own strength. The fact that his massive and expensive doors were left swinging in the wind was proof that Agamemnon was sure he could leave Aulis behind without a thought, overtake Troy, and return to have the whole world at his feet.

Clytemnestra strolled out onto the overgrown pathway that lead away from the doors and down, several miles down to the coast, where a small stair that clung to the rockface of the cliffs by the sea opened to the port. Few cypress trees, and most of those transplanted from Agamemnon's Cypress conquest, dotted the plains that Clytemnestra walked through, but the breeze was more than welcome and cooled her enough to not want shade. The sun was just bleeding over the horizon, and the breeze in the hazy sky was enough to allow Clytemnestra to breathe.

There was a copse of older trees just out of eyesight from the palace, and as Clytemnestra approached it she saw the movement that can only be made by man underneath the far-reaching branches. She sped up her pace slightly, thinking how she was moving faster than the sun. Around her, the arid grass was beginning to tremble once again under the force of the wind, and she could see the feeble light glinting on the armor of Mycenaean soldiers as they shifted beneath the trees, and none of them watching her approach.

She was at the copse, now, and still they had not seen her. She did not recognize these soldiers; she recognized none of the men and women gathered, who all stared in the same direction, down toward the coast.

Clytemnestra looked from face to face, and still they did not see her. Fear made her heart beat even faster than it had since she had first felt the wind, and she wondered for the briefest of moments if this was all some trick of the gods, some hallucination that she suffered in the heat. But the pain in her bare feet, as they stood on the sharp stones beneath the trees, told her that she was wide awake, and that it was these strange people that were caught in a trance.

Orestes and Electra were among them, staring toward the port with a blank look in their eyes.

"What is… why, my children!" she said to them, and approached, and touched each of their shoulders, and bent to look in their faces.

Her words and her actions seemed to awaken the group. Suddenly the woman who stood behind her children put her own hands on their shoulders and pulled them a step back. Only the children remained fixated on the direction of the port.

"This wind is wondrous, is it not?" she tried, trying to bring her children to the present. It was as if they could not hear her, for their eyes glanced to her every few seconds, but they remained as yet close-lipped and motionless other than their large brown eyes.

"Yes, my lady, as you say," was the rote response of the strange woman. Clytemnestra examined her, and saw that she indeed looked like some nurse or other that lived at the palace. She looked around at the other faces, and saw not one other person she recognized or whom she might talk to.

"My husband… my lord Agamemnon. He is pleased?"

The nurse would not look at her. She looked at the port, or she looked at the children, or she looked at the ground, but she did not look at Clytemnestra. "He… is not here, ma'am."

"Well, that I can see!" Clytemnestra responded petulantly. She looked around again and again, and saw these strange, nameless Mycenaean faces coming closer and closer to her, and she began to feel… frightened.

"Where is he?"

The nurse would not speak.

Clytemnestra looked down at her stricken children (they were certainly stricken, they were behaving so strangely about _something_) and demanded, "Where is your father?"

The children could not speak.

She walked up to one soldier until she was so close she could see individual hairs on his unshaven face. "Where is my lord Agamemnon? Your king?"

"The port. Above it. My lady." He spoke softly, but he did not look at her.

She did not care. She went back to the nurse and grabbed the woman's wrists, wrenching her hands from the shoulders of her children. "I shall take them to bid goodbye to their father. You would do well not to subvert me at this moment."

She looked down at her two children beneath her hands, who shifted only a foot in her tirade. She would take them, shake them from this odd behavior, and deal with this nurse later.

Two.

There were three.

There should be three.

Iphigenia was not in this group beneath the copse.

She looked at the nurse again and there was now genuine anger within her. "And Iphigenia, where is she? I demand that one of any of you inform me where my daughter is."

None spoke, and none looked at her, save the first soldier. "Above the port, my lady. King Agamemnon bid that she be the new bride of Lord Achilles before leaving for Troy."

Clytemnestra's hands fell from the shoulders of Electra and Orestes, and she did not see their gazes upon her face and the tears streaming from their big brown eyes. She did not see the nurse grabbing them back, because the children were moving to cling to their mother. She did not see the soldiers starting forward to restrain her, because she had already broken away and was racing toward the cliffs above the port, her wrapper flying behind her.

Her knowledge of the outdoors fled from her faster than she had fled from the strangers, and soon her feet were cut and bleeding from the rocks in the path. All sense of time and place left her, too, until she could not say how long it took her or how far she ran until she reached the edge of the cliff that stopped before the vast expanse of lapis lazuli ocean and oxblood sky.

There, winded and torn and senseless she found herself before a ceremonial fire, the priests of Aulis at the head, and her husband beside them. The warlords were gathered in a semicircle around the fire, of which only ashes remained. Violet smoke rose towards the crimson sky.

She knew nothing else, but she knew that this was no wedding ceremony; this was a sacrifice. She knew then nothing more, other than that her daughter, Iphigenia, who had asked for nothing but a lapis blue tunic on her last birthday, was dead.

She saw nothing else, but she saw the evil behind Agamemnon's tears, crocodile tears like the ones she had seen on their campaign down the Nile.

She heard nothing else, but she heard the shouts of the warlords as she flew at her husband and reached up her hands to scratch at his face, to tear open those eyes that looked at her in disgust and condescension and hatred.

She wanted nothing more, not even her daughter returned to life, than to hate Agamemnon, and she knew also that it was not in her to hate, but to love to her own destruction.

She did feel him strike a blow, not on her face, but her neck, and she was on the ground in the cold coals, choking on her crushed windpipe and the smoke that she inhaled. Still, she knew him and wanted to hate him and destroy him, and she crawled onto her knees because she could not stand on her bleeding feet and spat on his cloak.

She knew she was on the ground, but that was all she knew now.

One of her eyes was filled with blood, and she could feel one of the delicate bones was snapped and it hurt her every time she blinked. She knew that someone had done this to her, and that still she wanted vengeance, some sort of mortal vengeance, but she could not remember who or why, only that her broken heart was choking her.

She knew that something had happened to her, that someone was missing and she wanted to weep for them, but each time she tried to cry out her throat closed further and shooting pains sent her into temporary blindness, and she could do nothing but close her eyes and think it all through.

Something that felt warm against the chill of the wind was wrapping around her, and she knew it was a mortal touch, and she wanted to cry again, but felt an unknown darkness coming over her.

"The most beautiful thing I have ever seen!"

"How beautiful, oh, gods, how beautiful!"

"Praise to Artemis in her mercy!"

"It is a tribute to you, Agamemnon, that your daughter should so please the virgin goddess. This will not be forgotten."

In her failing, Clytemnestra heard the astonished voices of the lords around exclaiming at what they had seen. She did not need their narration; she could imagine the death of her daughter all on her own, and see the treachery of Artemis all on her own, and she tried one last time to cry out, _You fools, you are all fools, and I am a fool! We should be in that fire, but let Agamemnon go first! My daughter should be shedding but one tear for all of us as she should live, and we should all go to Hades! How could it come to this!_

The arms held her and did not touch her hurt throat or pain her eye, and so she let the blackness overcome her.

"An immaculate trade! Praise be to Artemis! May the maiden Iphigenia eternally please her, Lady of the Forest!"


	4. The Plains of Aulis

**The Plains of Aulis**

Clytemnestra awoke in pain, and knew that it was midday as sure as she knew she was alive.

Much of her physical discomfort had been eased. Her throat was moist, and doubtless a liquid had been poured down it for some time until the pain had been eased. A cold, numbing compress covered one eye, and she raised a hand to feel the bandage that went around her head to hold it in place.

"She is awake, my lord," spoke a voice, a medicinal voice, as sure as Clytemnestra thought she knew people, and she took not a moment to wonder where she lay.

She sat up and waited for the dizziness to pass her, and the dots to fade from her good eye, and she gazed about her. Soldiers, a sort of healing woman, and people she did not know. The faces were blurred, and the high brown walls around her indicated only that she was in _some_ room in the palace.

She was hurt, and confused, but she could still fight. She reached out and clawed the air until the few people surrounding her leapt back, and she tumbled from the bed. Her sleeping tunic, and the dizziness from her injuries at the hands of Agamemnon, coupled to bring her to her knees when she tried to stand. The healing woman reached out to help her, and Clytemnestra struck out again and again, and every few seconds screamed and tried to stand. She could keep doing this; she could squat here and fight like a dying animal until her throat closed up again. He was here; she could _feel_ Agamemnon was here, behind this or that nameless face in the small crowd, and she would get to him, she would scream until he was forced to come to her—

Her efforts and dizzy fury were checked by a short blow to the back of her head. It was not enough to hurt her, but enough to send her senses spinning until she was sprawled on the dustless floor, and the stone accepted her tears.

He was bending over her, and through her own blood and dirty hair and healing herbs she could not smell his breath, and for some reason she wanted to. She wanted to know he was human and mortal and breakable as she was, and then she cried harder because she knew that he was not, that there was something in this man that neither she nor anyone would ever understand, and that was why he was going to get whatever he asked.

"That's enough. You must be quiet now." Then he was away from the back of her, and she especially noticed his position though she did not look at him because a hunted animal always instinctively knows the position of its attacker.

"You have all done enough. I shall see to it the lady gets to port. She must be there within the hour to see off the ships."

One strong hand under each of her arms set Clytemnestra upright on her feet, and then they moved to her waist as she was steered out of the old room. The crowd stepped back and murmured among themselves, and she knew they would not remember the queen's embarrassment by the end of the hour.

They were walking down the empty corridor (everyone was at the port or at their duties) when she tried another escape. She reached down to the arm at her waist and dug in her nails and raked back, and then twisted to free herself from the vice-like grip. The tanned arm pulled moved under her nails and released her for a moment, and she scrambled to get away when the back of her tunic was snatched and she was dragged to the ground.

She looked up into the pitying face of Achilles.

"My lord!" she cried, her voice broken and winded from the injury and her own screaming, and it was the first thing she was conscious of saying. Until that moment, when she had deliberately tried to hurt the man in her whirlwind drive at avenging her daughter, she had not been aware of what she spoke. She thought now that she had doubtlessly screamed obscenities and curses and all sorts of pain-filled blasphemy in that airless room, and before the face of the most-feared warlord in the known world she was brought to her knees in instinctive acquiescence.

"You've done enough of that, now," he said, and she heard the quiet soothing in his voice and saw the strengthening pity in his face, and she wondered how she could have thought it was her husband merely because of his ruthless touch.

He held out his hand, and she sat for a split-second at his feet before she placed her own hand in it and was hauled to her feet. He kept the grip, not harshly, but bracingly, and hurried her down the corridor until they passed out through the doors of lapis lazuli blue. "Agamemnon and dozens of ships and myself are leaving within the hour," he said, and she noted the repetition for the third time, as though he were trying to reassure her of something. "You are to be at the port."

"Did my lord Agamemnon request this?"

"Request what, my lady?" He did not look at her as much as he had once before.

She wanted to fall to her knees at that subtle hint, but she kept walking. His hold on her hand would let her do no less.

He had ordered it all. He had calculated it all.

Agamemnon had outflanked everybody once again, and now he was about to embark on the greatest triumph of this, the greatest kingdom ever known.

The night before (there had to have been a night before, even if she felt like it had been a thousand years since she had not felt pain) he had been preparing to sacrifice his own daughter to Artemis. He had planned it all so that he did not have to lay one finger on his own wife or even look at her.

And he wanted her now to give him a royal and respectable sendoff.

"Did he even feel…" Clytemnestra searched for the word in her injured psyche and struggled against the rising flood of tears, and gave up. "Did he even know?"

"No. He was as always," Achilles answered, and he slowed almost imperceptibly.

"Oh…" The little involuntary syllable was all she could muster. "Oh…"

They walked in silence then, and Clytemnestra began to feel nothing. Her mangled face, which she knew must now be hideous, was motionless and her breathing became more regular with each passing minute. She became blind to the beautiful, sunlit plains they crossed in the same path that she had taken to the port several hours before.

But when they reached the copse of trees, Achilles pulled her to a stop.

She was beyond being surprised at the will of men, and so she did not even look at him. She waited for him to get on with whatever it was he wanted to do.

"Look at me, Clytemnestra."

She turned. She was expressionless. The hair in front of her battered face did not move with her breath.

"We will all be gone within the hour."

She saw that violet smoke and tasted it deep in her throat and smelled, and remembered how she had thought it was her daughter, and then realized she did not even have those sensory stimulants of her left. Iphigenia was as gone as if she had never existed.

"No war is fated to a victory. Many will never return. No matter what happens in the end, Clytemnestra, we are still gone at the end of this day, and as long as we are gone you are free and yourself."

She had not known Iphigenia all that well. Her daughter had been raised by singers and nurses and cooks, like her other children. She was the wife of a king, not a mother. Iphigenia's death was both a loss and a personal insult. Either way, Clytemnestra was cut through the heart.

"Do not forget to feel, Clytemnestra. I have spent all my life under the control of my own mind, and it is a half-life. Do not let this end Clytemnestra. At the end of this hour, begin again, and find how to win the day."

She stared into his lapis lazuli blue eyes as she removed the bandage from her head, and he stared into hers, one weeping and the other closed. She let the white wrap and the crumbling compress fall to the ground, and Achilles took the hand that dropped it and bowed before her. Her tears dropped to the arid ground in front of him as he slowly stood.

"He has killed himself," she whispered. "Do not do the same."

"I act only for myself, not on behalf of others, as Agamemnon does," Achilles said, and there was a faint, confident expression playing about his lips. "And so I won't bid you be happy. I hope only that you do what you will. It will be a change… but then, the winds have come, and everything is about to change."

Clytemnestra said nothing more as they moved on to the cliffs. The mile to the walls passed fleetingly, and they did not stop to look out over the many ships filling the expansive port until they spilled out into the sea, a mess of war machines. The two descended the stairs without worrying over the sway and creak of the whitened wood. Then they were at the base of the cliffs, and they in front of the ceremonial fire built into a shallow cave.

There, before the High King Agamemnon and Odysseus and Menelaus and all the many Greek lords boarding their ships for this, the greatest adventure that had yet to begin, Achilles, son of the goddess Thetis, stooped slightly and gently, like an evening zephyr, and brushed his lips against Clytemnestra's forehead. Then he turned and walked down the whitened planks, disappearing among the vessels. The queen was here, and the fleet could begin to set off and find the rest of the ships with which it was to demolish Troy.

When the last ship was untied and rowed out of the port, Clytemnestra raised one hand, a lone figure on the beach, and a faint, confident expression played about her lips.

"This is my home now," Clytemnestra spoke, without the tremor of injury or fear or sadness. "It is where I last beheld Iphigenia, daughter of Clytemnestra. It is where I was betrayed by Artemis, goddess of the forest. These hateful walls shall see only vengeance."

The hour was passed.

"Aulis is mine."


End file.
